One of the favorite phrases used by alarmists as a way to worry us over fossil fuels (besides the CO2 component) is to cite “peak oil”, to make us think we won’t be able to locate additional reserves soon. This graph below was prominently featured in Treehugger.
Only one problem, it is a unitless graph, no timeline, no volume. So, it then becomes not science, but propaganda art. While we were discussing the thread NIPCC, Gleick, heads, sand, water bottles, and all that commenter DirkH found yet another “peak” which seems pretty amusing:
DirkH says: September 1, 2011 at 11:38 am
[Peter] Gleick is head of the Pacific Institute; according to wikipedia, they have discovered “peak water”. While reading about it, I accidentally found a list of peak-somethings on this wikipedia page (near the end):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_water
I like especially “peak soil”. I think it’s time to declare “peak BS”; the moment the production of BS cannot conceivably go any higher and future BS production will dwindle until mankind runs out of BS.
Hey look, another unitless graph from Wikipedia:
Here’s the peakage list. Who knew?
Other resource peaks
I’ve given some extensive thought to what other peaks have been observed or are expected to happen:
Peak Gore (this has already occurred):
When a skeptic blog can kick yer butt on the Internet every day of the week and twice on Sundays, you know nobody but the faithful is listening anymore:
Peak Hansen: (May have occurred this week)
The three strikes rule is well recognized in law and in baseball, with three arrests now has the mighty Jimbo struck out at NASA?
Peak McKibben (This is far into the future)
There’s no limit on crazy pronouncements o_O especially when combined with Keith Olbermann.
Peak Public Opinion on Global Warming (Occurred in 2008, according to Gallup poll)
Peak Pikas (Cancelled, told ya so)
Retired Engineer @11:25 a.m. “As for Peak Water, if you take more out than Mother Nature
puts in, you don’t have a peak, you just run out.”
And where does that water go? It doesn’t escape into space in any appreciable amount, does it? Which means it must still be right here on the good ol’ Earth. 🙂
@James Baldwin Sexton says:
September 2, 2011 at 12:10 pm
[Snipped to get to…]
“Clean water supply is simply something Malthusians use to hyperventilate about. Water doesn’t get used, it simply moves. […]
Excellent point, sir. Not only that, but the earth is constantly getting more water in the form of ice balls from space. We’ll hit peak water when when it stops raining down from space or we’ve split off all the ‘O’ to get at the hydrogen in H2O, whichever comes first. (No, I’m not holding my breath for either one.)
The depth and breadth of ignorance displayed by the folks posting here is simply stunning. Peak Oil is a serious subject. You folks don’t need to agree with it. I don’t completely myself. But you should understand it because if true, it is important to your future. And unlike “climate science” it has made at least one accurate prediction.
It is based on the work of 20th Century American Geophysicist M King Hubbert who studied oil and gas field development and production. Hubbert suggests that oil and gas production in individual fields and overall follows a sort of bell shaped curve called a logistic curve. Peak production occurs when about half the recoverable resource has been produced.
Hubbert predicted that peak oil production in the US would occur around 1970. And it did. Not all Hubbert predictions have been accurate. In particular he mispredicted peak natural gas production … twice. It’s unclear whether the problem is that the theory is wrong or estimates of recoverable resources are often too poor to support accurate predictions. Still though, oil companies and energy planners take Hubbert’s theory seriously.
I have to tell you folks that even though I think global warming is largely pseudo-science and that many of the well known spokespersons are either sincerely misinformed, opportunists or outright charlatans, I take energy issues seriously. I expect that those of you who dismiss them are in for one hell of a surprise — maybe in the next few years — maybe in a decade or two. We aren’t gonna die. But we aren’t gonna be real happy either.
For more information try Wikipedia and or http://www.theoildrum.org
Tim Fitzgerald says: “This fits in nicely with a paper I am going to submit to Nature. My hypothesis is that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere causes an increase in irrational behavior and asinine asinine statements. I will call my theory “global dumbing.”
Ach. Der gotterdummerung!
Peak Oil?
Talking the price up?
Don K says:
September 2, 2011 at 3:02 pm
The term itself has been polluted by the insane “The End Is Nigh” crowd, and likely can’t ever be recovered. It is also merely a potential retrospective judgment: we won’t know we’ve passed over “Peak Oil” until at least a few years (if not more than a decade) after the fact. Ergo, it’s relatively useless to even talk about Peak Oil outside of a few specialist conversations.
It also doesn’t actually mean anything at all to the average end-product consumer, since we have to pay whatever it costs. Even if you’re an oil investor, it’s still not something you can use to guarantee any particular position.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that anyone who talks in public seriously about ‘Peak Oil’ deserves precisely the abuse they receive.
Peak oil is baloney. Every year since the 1970’s, we have been at the peak of “peak oil”.
This is because technology keeps expanding discovery and reclamation, which keeps increasing supply in step with increasing demand.
Eventually, this trend may not continue. But, then, who says the population and energy demand will be forever increasing?
One thing we unfortunately haven’t reached yet is “Peak Human Stupidity” even though
I’m quite sure that the human race achieved “Peak Intelligence” many years ago!
I’m with Nuke Nemisis…where’s the scientific graph of PEAK HYSTERIA!
Why do these dimensionless “peak this” and “peak that” curves remind me of the Drake Equation?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122603134258207975.html
Sorry, forgot to mention…has anyone read Monseigneur Hansen’s attack on Obama?
Called him a GreenWash President!!!! This is going to be better than a Colombian Bullfight…get a seat, bring a picnic…but remember, don’t sit not too close to the arena fence…if you know what I mean!
Here’s a horrible one: peak jobs:
“No New Jobs Created in August, Unemployment Rate Stuck at 9.1%”
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENCA372&=&q=no+new+jobs+created&oq=no+new+jobs+c&aq=0v&aqi=g-v2&aql=&gs_sm=c&gs_upl=1040l4326l0l7310l17l14l1l0l0l0l326l2258l3.5.3.2l13l0
Or is this some sort of twisting of facts to heighten the urgency of Obama’s delayed jobs speech?
For every day the population grows, we’re always at peak poop.
For some reason the greens do nothing to reduce the pooping. Why is that? Can’t they even fathom the amount of energy needed to clean up their crap? Cows might be damned by the greens but my God we’re all damned by the emissions from the the greens accumulated crap.
The greens are so looney they think it is the amount of water used to flush their crap that is the problem. Fine, I say, then don’t flush your god damn toilet no more, you smelly bastards! :-()
Peak pique?
I think the ‘Hubbert’s curve’ often used to model resource consumption may be missing a demand throttling parameter such as that imposed by OPEC to flatten out the top of the curve and delay the onset of irreversibly ‘Declining Oil’ production. It may well be that the steep gasoline price rises prior to the crash in 2008 were due to false predictions of “Peak Oil.”
I note that the Hubbert’s-curve based, ‘Peak Oil’ toy provided by the University of Chicago shows that ‘World Oil Production’ with an assumed peak width of 35 years, and ‘Total Reservoir Size, Gtons’ of 300 (50 Gtons more than the BP estimate) and peak year of 2020 will just about match the world production data from about 1900 to 1955 and 1994 to 2003 (last data provided.) The Y-axis scale does not appear to be logarithmic as claimed in the second note.
Hubbert’s Peak Calculator
http://geoflop.uchicago.edu/forecast/docs/Projects/hubbert.html
The point of the story about ‘The Boy who Cried Wolf’ was not that he cried wolf when there was no wolf, but, that after doing this, nobody believed him when the wolf really did come.
So, by implication you are saying there is an infinite source of oil? There will never be a time in the future when all the oil has been consumed? If the source of oil *is* finite, then surely at some time it must run out? What message are you trying to convey here, that we have infinite resources so we should just carry on? (No one here has mentioned the biogenisis theory of oil production, have they? The idea that deep rock bacteria are perpetually generating oil that floats to the top? Even that has a problem because it can only be produced at a certain maximum rate, so there would be a limit to extraction there as well.)
Stark Dickflüssig says:
We will never hit Peak Air.
don’t be so sure.
The peak oil wiki page is quite informative, and I have looked into the Energy Information Administration’s data on production quite a bit. As I understand it peak oil is a potential problem for the economy for the following reasons…
** Individual oil wells exhibit a production curve that looks like the curves shown (quite similar to a bell curve, known as the Hubbert curve).
** Countries and regions can also exhibit roughly the same shape when production is not restrained (North Sea is a good example of this).
** The Earth is a finite collection of countries, and so far seems to be forming the first half of the Hubbert curve.
** World production of oil has held pretty flat since 2004/2005, despite record high oil prices that should have encouraged production. If this trend keeps up for another year or two, it would be unprecedented in the production record, which usually increases year-by-year.
** Oil company CEOs have admitted that conventional oil has become more difficult to find.
** Oil discoveries worldwide have been on a decreasing trend since the 60’s. The graph of the discovery record exhibits much the same bell shape.
** Worldwide production has outstripped discoveries since the 80’s, meaning we have been digging into reserves discovered in the past. Roughly 25 Billion barrels produced worldwide per year currently (and going up). Roughly 10 Billion barrels discovered per year currently (likely going down if trends continue).
** Optimistic estimates for the biggest new players such as the tar sands and western Iraqi oil coming online may not be able to offset quickly enough the declines in other major producers such as Mexico, North Sea, and the USA.
** There are rumors that the Saudis have been injecting the largest field in the world, called Ghawar, with sea water in order to increase production. This is generally a sign of a mature field that is at or near peak.
This is something that ought to be investigated further and addressed, unless you like a shrinking economy. Investment and hard work are needed. It ought not be relegated to the funny pages.
I think we’re past peak typewriter. Something must be done!
How come if the US is past it peak in oil production and starving for energy, that it is the second largest exporters of coal in the world? How come if the EU is so “green” and “environmentally friendly” it is the single largest importer of coal in the world?
Or maybe I have it wrong. Maybe the EU is busy sequestering carbon by burying all the coal that the US is digging up and shipping to the EU, in return for carbon credits. Buy one ton of coal from the US for $17, $3 a ton to ship it to the EU, then bury it in the EU and get a $30 carbon credit. Make $10 a ton as fast as you can ship it.
http://coal.infomine.com/commodities/Global/Assets/Images/CoalSeaborneTrade.jpg
Surfer Dave says:
So, by implication you are saying there is an infinite source of oil?
No, the supply of cheap oil is limited. However, there is still quite a bit of expensive oil, and quite a bit more of the very expensive oil. There is an infinite supply of infinitely expensive oil.
vigilantfish says (September 2, 2011 at 5:09 pm): “Here’s a horrible one: peak jobs”
Well, we do seem to have hit peak “buggy whip maker” jobs; some time ago, in fact. 🙂
I find the chart reassuring. They have been pumping oil for about 100 years, so we should have about another 100 years to go …
long after I’m deadso maybe I’ll see it’s end (since I’m going to live forever).Les Johnson says:
September 2, 2011 at 9:33 am
There is a remarkable correlation between rock song quality (as measured by Rolling Stone Top 500), and US oil production.
This is uncanny and must, I mean must have a deep inner meaning. Just don’t ask me, I have no idea. I now focus almost entirely on old French Canadian Country Western Music. And though I greatly admire Lucille Starr, can find no correlation to global warming.
Peak oil. Please. Stop. The Stupid. Enough. Projections are not needed.
The market, and the market alone will figure out when we reach peak oil and it will not be in our life times. It will not be in our life times. Really. Stop being stupid. Quote all the crackpots you want. We will never see peak oil in our life times. Wake me up when we get to peak oil.
I am with Don on this one – I am certainly not convinced by the AGW arguments – but the theory and science behind peak oil is a lot more serious
Read the Oil Drum blog, and also Chris Martenson
http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse
this should be compulsory reading for all politicians and policy makers
IMHO